Tag Archives: 4ms

Superbooth was busy, as always. Here are some subjective impressions. Disclaimer: This is a list based on our personal opinion. As always, no one has the ultimate knowledge when it comes to art, it only matters to us what made us really happy: each to their own.

Doepfer is carrying on what they had always been good at – it might be a bit slower, though they are pushing out interfaces and modules which offer almost the same functionality for an affordable price. Let it be a keyboard or quad VCO, they are and will be here to stay.

Soundwise though, two highlights can be mentioned – one would be the new/old Nanozwerg Pro from MFB reborn in eurorack format for a ridiculously good price. Another one is the Fold Processor from Tiptop. We could speculate that after Random Source stole the show with their Serge reincarnations, Tiptop decided to put their Serge module concepts aside and develop their own, with the best controls with intuitive feel featuring the sound that are completely taking a modulation concept to the next level. We have no complaints about the Digitakt from Elektron either. Check
out this audio demo to see if you agree with us.

Interface-wise, let’s begin with the Soundmachines – Arches – one of our customers told us a few years ago that how mad it would be to have a full keyboard full of LS-1 Lightstrips… fast forward to 2017 and he is not alone with his idea any more. The Arches is to be out in September.

Erica Synths also showed us how anti-futurism can be beaten by retro-futurism. A versatile drum sequencer with computer keyboards – its price is yet to be confirmed.

Other fun ideas worth mentioning – click on the links for the videos:

High-end audio solutions are not hard to find in eurorack any more – ARREL Audio modules speak for themselves.

Expert Sleepers shared some details with us about the Disting MK4 firmware plus introduced us a new module.

Eloquencer – a really thought-out sequencer in the pathway of the Malekko Varigate…

The entry-level question: “What other modules should I get?” The entry-level answer “more VCA’s”. Now here are other cool tools that would basically put any modular synth setup towards a further evolutionary step.

Erica Synths – Black Xfade

Hardly any modules can be found for crossfading – yes, you can crossfade between two seperate VCA’s – yes you can do it with any modulation signal and its inverted pair. But come on, it can be much easier with a dedicated module which can even keep the signal at a constant gain! Erica Synths have always been loved for these quirks (e.g. the emphasis de-emphasis circuit on the Black Quad VCA). The audio on the Black Xfade is high-quality and any “weird” or chaotic waveform can be tamed to be less clicky and more controlled.

More tips (approved and recommended by the manufacturer):

use it as a waveshaper with original vs. boosted signal.

you can also crossfade between two clock or any CV signals.

4ms Company – Shifting Inverting Signal Mingler (SISM)

4ms Company – SISM

It is hard to begin to talk about this module, because you have to mention at least 4 different terms. Any signal can be turned inside out – boosted up, cut into (two) half(-ves), mixed, “mirrored” .

Apart from that, the MIX SWitch (jack outputs sum of all channels with nothing plugged into their output jack),

For DIY’ers: you can find a PAD breakout header (2×4) on the PCB which can be connected to an external DIY module that enables a pre-set pad (attenuation) on each channel. Any modulation signal of yours can receive its passport to new territories in new and simultaneous forms with this module!

Other good tools people seem to forget about…

You might want to remain simplistic or regard polarizing as an enhancer of the modulation section of your system. A tool that “shifts” and turns signals “inside out”…

Steady State Fate – GND Cntrl: some users crave visual feedback and precision. I much more prefer numeral feedback than staring at visuals on a small screen. Each to its own… The SSF Gnd Cntrlmatches and attenuates / divides audio and CV signals to minute hyper-precision ranges. Ideal for live or studio!

AWM-3 – VC mixer and wavefolder

And finally, something new: these tools are getting more and more varied each year: a new module is the AWM-3 from Vintage Synth Lab. It is an all analog, real-time, complex wave-shaping (triple wave-folder) 3-channel mixer module with added features of compression and multiple mix modes including matrix mixes.

The Analogue Zone is right there at NAMM 2017, live and direct every day! They are organising a live stream starting in a few hours with eurorack makers and the one and only Richard Devine.

Analogue Zone encourages every one of their customers or viewers to send them their questions to be asked at a live q&a session from NAMM with eurorack makers Dan Green (4ms), Tony Rolando (Make Noise), William Matthewson (WMD) & Richard Devine!

Analogue Zone is live and direct at NAMM, bringing us the latest and greatest at breakneck speed! Here is Day 0 with lots of eurorack news – yes, literally during the show was still being built.

4ms Company came up with the latest and we guess the almost final version of a sampler with enough ease of use, memory and depth – a great and easy to use sampler that is in harmony with their earlier dual modules that you can get crazy with using their ground-breaking clock modules that made them famous… The new Tapographic Delay could be called a good contestant of the Rainmaker with less width. the price will be in the range of the SMR.

Qu-Bit Electronix gives us the the Tone – a quad voltage control 24dB lowpass-bandpass filter – probably designed for the fantastically sounding Chord, and the Chance module, a Swiss Army knife of random signals including random rhythmic patterns. The Contour – a more modern take on the quad ADSR concept (coined in first by Doepfer) – shipping next week! Their Mixology has been updated with send-return, size-increase(!) thank god!) plenty of gain, and so on…

Pittsburgh Modular has updated their Lifeforms series with filters (a vactrolesque filter with unstable mode), adsr, mixers with new routings, oscillators …and and yes.. an in-rack mixer 🙂 Also, they have a new line of cases – with enough power till the next century.

WMD came up with a prototype trigger sequencer (an A-157 on steroids in short) Arpitecht, a beautiful quantizer concept. Also (dj and live) performance oriented tools are a compressor, a filter with stereo width effect have been seen in their rack this year!

Steven Hansleigh from 2hp introduced yet again(!) a few new 2HP modules, including known concepts such as the tiniest Turing Machine, a multiple Clock source module or sample-and-holds which are new in this size. Each user will find at least one cool module to fill up the remaining 2HP space of their racks.

Endorphines were busy with updating their Shuttle Control, and their Grand Terminal is also ready for shipping. The Cockpit which we have seen last year is also an amazing routing and compression mixer tool!

and can also be used as a “VCO controller” acquring a well-adjusted V/octave control for your (up to six) oscillators

Also, you can check out the latest scales that have become available in SMR (as you know it is not only a dynamic bandpass filter, it has always been able to generate scales in self-oscillation since the beginning):

4ms Company might be a maker that all of us should be proud of thanks to their innovative aim. Even if we were not that interested in the “maths” in general, it would bring new life into your sounds’ temporal dimensions. Their latest sound processors are of a different generation, however, I do see the effort of them getting to a novel aim. The company’s recent 20 year anniversary being still around, I thought I would show you my personal highlights from 4ms.

New dimensions in rhythms and beats

In my opinion, the 4ms Company products that have redefined modular synthesis and have saved it from the lovely but obviously limited linearity of sequencer-based “Berlin school” types of electronic music are still their clock modules…

Let’s recap. Take a clock divider. Give it a master clock, e.g. an LFO. The divider will spit out divisions that were set by the outputs. Like on the A-160-2 Doepfer Clock Divider:

The scheme of the A-160-2 clock divider

So far, this is just a very badly designed “snake game” in which the snake cannot be navigated through the wall. What you would really want is to maneuver your snake through the walls, because this way you earn your points more easily yet with more variety. Now this is exactly

what the Rotating Clock Divider and the Shuffling Clock Multiplier modules do. They rotate the output signals, so each divided clock signal appears on a different output as soon as you add an input signal to the Rotate input. So your kick suddenly starts trilling, your hihats suddenly slow down, claps start to rattle, envelopes go mad, etc. It may sound mathematical and generative, yet it still pleases your senses. You can even fine tune these and get new modes with their expanders (SCM Breakout), (RCD Breakout).

The clock divisions can be rotated on the 4ms RCD

I would never say something stupid that “this had not been done before by anybody”. Obviously, if you patch the Doepfer outputs into an A-151 Quad Sequential Switch, something similar would already be happening. But honestly, how many times would you hear that compared to the relatively linear maybe ratcheting ways of clock dividers in the electronic music of the last 20 years?

Another thing I really like in this aim is addressing and challenging simplicity. Clock signals can be conceptualised in such a narrow way: saying “on and off” + “the time between these” would cover most of it, however with enough humbleness you can in fact reshape even this basic idea. Thanks to these modules, clock signals now – literally – add new dimensions to your rhythmic patterns, changing the topology of your timing in your system. Not to mention, that at audio rates they can function as sub-octave or sub-interval generators as well. Imagine crunchy chords, that can become really lush when you process them with a filter…

After the RCD and the SCM modules, let me praise the mighty king of clocks, the Quad Clock Distributor – and its expander. The QCD’s 4 independently resettable, CV controllable clock divider/multiplier sub-units powered up with the expansion module will provide you with enough rhythmic patterns till the end of civilisation. I have had it for 2 years, and I still find it really wonderfully inviting to work on new settings, not to even mention that I have mostly OR combined them… and yes, I wish you would forget anybody’s word being concerned about the width of the QCD expander. I would not even say that its an expander, it must be the end of the module’s story that is trying to tell you. Thanks to the pulse-width modulation, gate and trigger delay possibilities of the clocks and the attenuators, you will get the most delicate swings and accentuations in your music that you were dreaming about. Seriously. Listen to this.

Last but not least, I would also love to thank them for the QPLFO and thePEG, which also expanded and colored the concepts of LFO’s and envelopes (slope generators in this case). However, you must have realised which my favourite modules are. And who would not dream about the spaceship-style interface of the VCA Matrix?

Clean power for everyone

Despite being tempted to start criticising for the price ROW POWER (30 and 40) is the way to go.

First of all, no power module gives you enough on the +5V rail except this module. I have seen systems freezing or failing enough times in eurorack cases packed with enough power-hungry modules, but not with the black ROW POWER 40. So here you have an ever-cool (even on its front panel you would hardly feel much of warmth), super slim power supply module with clean sounding and plenty of power! I said it right when I said clean sounding! I definitely felt that even my audio modules sounded more “powerful” (a thing which I hesitated to believe when I was reading up about it at a forum topic).

Innovative digital audio processors

Don’t get me wrong: I have no bad things to say on the later generation of 4ms products. As concepts they are carving out the new digital realms and powers of eurorack. So I can only say that I still have a lack of enough personal experience with these modules: I have not even tried the Dual Looping Delay, and I am still new to the Spectral Multiband Resonator – it has been installed in one of the racks at the Analogue Zone showroom now, and has already got much use from the team and the guests. But as for audio, it must be a really subjective story. I have always liked different kinds of rhtyhms but I have always been picky – as everyone else – on sound. The SMR has to be used with the right kind of audio input and I would definitely spice it up to get rid of the somewhat recogniseable resonance tones. Think about something like the Trogotronic Tube VCA, the Erica Fusion Tube Mixer or the Kasleder Acid Fuzz, and you are on a really good way to get back to organic tones. Check out Divkid’s video on it – or check it out AGAIN if you already have:

One last thing… I have to say that the generally I have seen this company’s aims towards the customers. 4ms has always been reasonable with pricing, and they even offer some of their projects as kits as much more affordable products. And as I said, they are letting you sorting it out: they are not forcing a fixed musical concept from a certain era – which would be no offence for me, as I am also following a tradition of electronic music – they are saying do whatever sounds, whatever rhythms, at ease. because we have been able to give the space and opportunity for all these. Long live 4ms!

4ms Company might be a maker that all of us should be proud of thanks to their innovative aim. Even if we were not that interested in the “maths” in general, it would . Their latest sound processors are of a different generation, however, I do see the effort of them getting to a novel aim. The company’s recent 20 year anniversary being still around, I thought I would show you my personal highlights from 4ms.

New dimensions in rhythms and beats

In my opinion, the 4ms Company products that have redefined modular synthesis and have saved it from the lovely but obviously limited linearity of sequencer-based “Berlin school” types of electronic music are still their clock modules…

Let’s recap. Take a clock divider. Give it a master clock, e.g. an LFO. The divider will spit out divisions that were set by the outputs. Like on the A-160-2 Doepfer Clock Divider:

The scheme of the A-160-2 clock divider

So far, this is just a very badly designed “snake game” in which the snake cannot be navigated through the wall. What you would really want is to maneuver your snake through the walls, because this way you earn your points more easily yet with more variety. Now this is exactly

what the Rotating Clock Divider and the Shuffling Clock Multiplier modules do. They rotate the output signals, so each divided clock signal appears on a different output as soon as you add an input signal to the Rotate input. So your kick suddenly starts trilling, your hihats suddenly slow down, claps start to rattle, envelopes go mad, etc. It may sound mathematical and generative, yet it still pleases your senses. You can even fine tune these and get new modes with their expanders (SCM Breakout), (RCD Breakout).

The clock divisions can be rotated on the 4ms RCD

I would never say something stupid that “this had not been done before by anybody”. Obviously, if you patch the Doepfer outputs into an A-151 Quad Sequential Switch, something similar would already be happening. But honestly, how many times would you hear that compared to the relatively linear maybe ratcheting ways of clock dividers in the electronic music of the last 20 years?

Another thing I really like in this aim is addressing and challenging simplicity. Clock signals can be conceptualised in such a narrow way: saying “on and off” + “the time between these” would cover most of it, however with enough humbleness you can in fact reshape even this basic idea. Thanks to these modules, clock signals now – literally – add new dimensions to your rhythmic patterns, changing the topology of your timing in your system. Not to mention, that at audio rates they can function as sub-octave or sub-interval generators as well. Imagine crunchy chords, that can become really lush when you process them with a filter…

After the RCD and the SCM modules, let me praise the mighty king of clocks, the Quad Clock Distributor – and its expander. The QCD’s 4 independently resettable, CV controllable clock divider/multiplier sub-units powered up with the expansion module will provide you with enough rhythmic patterns till the end of civilisation. I have had it for 2 years, and I still find it really wonderfully inviting to work on new settings, not to even mention that I have mostly OR combined them… and yes, I wish you would forget anybody’s word being concerned about the width of the QCD expander. I would not even say that its an expander, it must be the end of the module’s story that is trying to tell you. Thanks to the pulse-width modulation, gate and trigger delay possibilities of the clocks and the attenuators, you will get the most delicate swings and accentuations in your music that you were dreaming about. Seriously. Listen to this.

Last but not least, I would also love to thank them for the QPLFO and thePEG, which also expanded and colored the concepts of LFO’s and envelopes (slope generators in this case). However, you must have realised which my favourite modules are. And who would not dream about the spaceship-style interface of the VCA Matrix?

Clean power for everyone

Despite being tempted to start criticising for the price ROW POWER (30 and 40) is the way to go.

First of all, no power module gives you enough on the +5V rail except this module. I have seen systems freezing or failing enough times in eurorack cases packed with enough power-hungry modules, but not with the black ROW POWER 40. So here you have an ever-cool (even on its front panel you would hardly feel much of warmth), super slim power supply module with clean sounding and plenty of power! I said it right when I said clean sounding! I definitely felt that even my audio modules sounded more “powerful” (a thing which I hesitated to believe when I was reading up about it at a forum topic).

Innovative digital audio processors

Don’t get me wrong: I have no bad things to say on the later generation of 4ms products. As concepts they are carving out the new digital realms and powers of eurorack. So I can only say that I still have a lack of enough personal experience with these modules: I have not even tried the Dual Looping Delay, and I am still new to the Spectral Multiband Resonator – it has been installed in one of the racks at the Analogue Zone showroom now, and has already got much use from the team and the guests. But as for audio, it must be a really subjective story. I have always liked different kinds of rhtyhms but I have always been picky – as everyone else – on sound. The SMR has to be used with the right kind of audio input and I would definitely spice it up to get rid of the somewhat recogniseable resonance tones. Think about something like the Trogotronic Tube VCA, the Erica Fusion Tube Mixer or the Kasleder Acid Fuzz, and you are on a really good way to get back to organic tones. Check out Divkid’s video on it – or check it out AGAIN if you already have:

One last thing… I have to say that the generally I have seen this company’s aims towards the customers. 4ms has always been reasonable with pricing, and they even offer some of their projects as kits as much more affordable products. And as I said, they are letting you sorting it out: they are not forcing a fixed musical concept from a certain era – which would be no offence for me, as I am also following a tradition of electronic music – they are saying do whatever sounds, whatever rhythms, at ease, because we have been able to give ourselves the space and opportunity for all these. Long live 4ms!

Being not so long after NAMM, Superbooth challenged both manufacturers and developers to come up with some surprises. Overall, it seems that many of them succeeded! You can find tiny but nice upgrades and completely new surprise systems from your favourite eurorack manufacturers. Here are the videos from Day 1.

We were waiting, we have been waiting and we will be waiting: Dave Rossum answered a few questions about the new phase modulation sampler module to be released by the end of this year:

A huge step up for Expert Sleepers – Disting MKIII users. Os introduced the sample playback and vocoder functions on the Disting along with a new module: the ES-8 will be adapting your line and modular level signals:

Doepfer Musikelektronik is alive and well: Dieter Doepfer is reintroducing a new version of their high-end VCO, the long awaited trigger sequencer is here, not to mention that thanks to the upcoming A-184-2 module and the already available PWM Module it won’t cause any problems to add extra waveforms to virtually any of their modules. A very basic but very handy set of new modules!

The surprise of the first day was Erica Synths and their Pico 3HP modules. That system is a fully functional and very clever “drum and synth” voice including sequencer and outputs!

Dave Smith Instruments came up with a eurorack module. The DSM-03 adds tuned feedback and Karplus Strong flanges to the soudn of their line of modules – or anything you want to use it with.

Dreaming about Akemie’s Castle, but not having the budget? ALM tries to help you with their new FM drum module with built-in envelope and basic functions built around the same Yamaha chip that made the others famous!

Allan J. Hall of AJH Synth was saying hello to Analogue Zone, and reintroduced some old treasures, a new-old and updated ladder filter design and an especially decent sounding Ring Modulator.